Day 4 - Putting a Face on the Work

Yesterday, we never got to see the home owner. On Sunday, we had seen people in the neighborhoods we "explored." On Monday, we talked to neighbors who were in the area of the Monoplex. But we never saw the home owner.

Today we did. She was an 81-year old, living in her FEMA trailer right beside a duplex house. This one happened to be an authentic duplex, and we found out that half of it had already been gutted. We prayed in the yard, and then got to work. The ONN crew interviewed the home owner and a few more team members, then went to gather more footage.

None of the windows inside the house would budge. I quickly discovered why--they had been nailed shut. I had to pry up four nails from each window pane before I could raise it. One of the people from Michigan helped me open windows in the back of the house, where they'd been caulked shut. He used the straight end of his pry bar as a chisel. He also helped decaulk, dismount, and remove a window air-conditioner. I asked him if he'd had any experience in construction, and it turned out that he had. I made sure to watch him when I could, and noticed he used his hammer to drive the pry bar into the kind of crevices and cracks that I'd always had trouble getting pried open.

Outside, Chuck orchestrated the setup of a ramp using an extension ladder and boards scavenged from a debris pile nearby. Inside, Chuck was ever-present to give a helping hand, and a hint on how to make the work easier: "Pry sideways, instead of up-and-down" he told me, "and you get more leverage." Sure enough, he was right. "That door frame will come off easier if you pry out the threshold first." He was right.

Later on, I broke part of a window frame, so that the windowpane would not stay in place. Chuck came to help me, and started by pulling rusty nails from different studs. He pounded the nails partway into the window frame, then tapped them on their sides until they bent like hooks. We hung the windowpane on the hooks, and Chuck secured it with more bent nails until it didn't shift when we let go of it.

After lunch, Chuck gathered everybody in the front room to show us how to remove drywall. He punched a hole in the wall, pulled out a chunk of particle board, and then changed his mind.

"This stuff is beaverboard. It doesn't work like drywall, so just get the biggest chunks you can and throw them in the wheelbarrow." He instructed us to spread out (to give each other room to work), and begin to tear out the wall material. In another room, we discovered four layers of wall material: wallpaper, paneling, drywall, and more drywall. In the midafternoon, the construction worker from Michigan climbed up into the attic, and began dropping the ceiling panels down onto the floor. He progressed from room to room. For safety reasons, we would stay out of the room he was above, until he finished. Then people would return to clean up the ceiling panels. Some were big enough to simply carry out to the pile--the exact thing Chuck suggested when dealing with drywall.

Toward the end of the day, we were running low on time again, and again we decided to stay longer and try to get more done. This time, we succeeded. After rounding up all of the tools, we got ready to say our goodbyes to the home owner. She insisted on hugging every one of us even though we were covered in sweat and dirt. When a person from Michigan said that reminded her of her grandmother, the home owner replied that we could call her "grandma" if we wanted to, since everybody else did. As she hugged me and said thanks, I said "you're welcome, Grandma."

I noticed yesterday that the devotional leader that had been at Camp Rowley was not there. In the evening, the youth group leader from California led the devotional. The same thing happened this morning and in the evening. I found out that anybody could volunteer to speak for a devotional, so I volunteered. The youth group leader from California asked me to talk to Brendan to make sure it was okay. But when I talked to Brendan, he asked me to talk to the youth group leader from California. In the meantime, two people had already volunteered to lead devotionals tomorrow, so the soonest I could speak was Thursday.

Since I don't consider myself to be that good of a speaker with crowds, I started thinking of ways to make an idea I had worthy of retelling.